The folly of doing business with Dell, et al…
A laptop from Dell was presented to the Clinic with the complaint that the laptop could not connect to the Internet, that others had spent time on it, the owner needed it quickly, and the data was backed up on an external drive.
Since time was of the essence, after verifying that critical parts were missing, and that there was much damage from items unknown, the quickest way to get the computer going again properly and permanently was to reload from a formatted disk.
It was known that the drivers would be a problem, but the total absence of support from the on-line resources was not fully appreciated.
Formatting the hard drive and reinstalling Windows XP from the supplied CDs was trivial.
Then the fun began because the load supplied could not connect to the Internet without key drivers for the Networking Interface - which were either never delivered with the computer or had been misplaced and were supposedly on the Internet. Usually, the information on the sales receipt is an inventory of the structure and components installed on that particular computer. The document was missing and unobtainable from the owner. Also, the shipping invoice was not available without contacting Dell during regular business hours.
Having been in this situation before and needing access to the Dell purchase order, a call was placed to Dell Customer Support and the fee of $99 plus tax was paid. It took until early the next day before the enabling document was received from Dell.
Then the fun began - again.
Because the sales document was missing, the reference number to the transaction was obtained from the bottom of the computer and given to the service person, but that didn't change the fact that it took an hour and 37 minutes of Dell time connected directly to my personal computer to assemble a CD that had the drivers needed to carry the drivers to the client computer.
The business of allowing Dell to connect to a known-good computer is a great benefit because Dell was able to download the missing necessary drivers onto my personal computer and Dell remotely could burn a CD that was used to carry the drivers over to the unit under test. It appears that the driver CD never was sent with the order or that it had been lost or that it never was a part of the parts list. It took an hour and 37 minutes for the person to identify the proper drivers and to download them onto my computer. The downloading took probably 5 minutes; the balance of the time was used by Dell figuring out what drivers out of the 104 prospective drivers were needed for this particular computer.
What Dell does is to assign each computer a nomenclature, in this case "Inspiron 1150", and then pile lots of similar configurations under that part number, relying on the shipping order to keep it all straight.
What became obvious was that once the support person had a copy of the sales order, that it took an hour and 32 minutes to figure out what driver to choose and 5 minutes to download them. Further, if it took all of that time for the Dell support person who had access to all of their consulting personnel all of that time to figure out what drivers to download, what chance does an end user have when reloading is required?
It is noted that the first patch to be installed was the chipset to assure the motherboard was going to work correctly.
The second driver installed was the NIC (Network Interface Card) which gave us access to the Internet.
While we did install the balance of the drivers without further reference to the Internet but used our downloaded drivers, we could have continued using the Internet from that point - if we knew which of the 104 drivers to choose.
Finally after the five drivers that were necessary were installed, the computer was rebooted and it was then ready for the Microsoft patches - all 63 of 'em.
The time on the phone in our session was three hours.
Then Adaware, Spybot, PcCillin and Acronis were installed. An image of the PcCillin Registration Acknowledgement was placed in the support directory.
The first three above were updated and Acronis was used to make a backup onto a partition that was created for that purpose.
ERUNT was added to keep a copy of the registry.
A second Acronis backup was placed upon the client's external USB hard drive.
An Acronis Bootable CD was created in case the computer became unbootable or corrupted to the extent that recovery of an Acronis image was desirable.
An inventory was created using Belarc and the result was placed in the support directory. This was intended to be a poor substitute for the missing Shipping Invoice.
There are some lessons to be learned here for SPAUG members:
Please send me an email if this has caused you to make failure recovery easier to handle.
RECOVERY CONSOLE should be on every computer in SPAUG.
Windows 2000 and XP allow the NTFS-file-system to be used on the system-drive ( C: ), maintaining data security, but allowing limited access to the disk via the Recovery Console to repair a damaged system (for example to fix boot problems).
Also, ERUNT should be installed to capture the registry in case of problems with viruses, etc. Restoring the registry to a prior setting is a neat way of reverting to before a virus.
Forrest demonstrated the various InterVideo products he represents. InterVideo supplies the OEM DVD player for many computers, so chances are if you have a DVD player, you have InterVideo software. What he showed were beyond the basic DVD playback. The applications allow video editing, DVD authoring and burning, DVD backup, and an application to convert from one media format to another. They included WinDVD 7; DVD Copy; VideoStudio 10; WinDVD Creator. If you missed the presentation, or want to refresh your memory, his presentation can be reviewed here.
Copyrighted July 2006
<N.B.- 13 Dec 06 - Gene Barlow of User Group Relations will give a presentation at the General Meeting.>
Backing up your computer's main hard drive is the most important task every user needs to do on a regular basis. Still, I hear end-users say they have nothing of value on their computers, so they really don't need to do backups. This is not true. I hope this article will help you understand why backups are important to do.
Most users think that the display, keyboard, and computer box are the main parts of their computer system. While the computer hardware is important, the real heart and soul of your computer are the many files stored on the hard drive. These files are what make the hardware run and do useful tasks. Without them, your computer would be useless.
Your computer's hard drive contains two general types of files on it - program files and data files. It is very important that you backup both of these types of files, but you will want to back them up for different reasons.
Program files include your Windows operating system and all of the application programs you run on your computer. Without them, your computer would do nothing. If your hard drive should fail without a backup, then you would have to spend days or weeks reloading all of these program files on your hard drive. This is a lot of work and you may never get your computer to run again like it did before the hard drive failed.
Data files are the files you create using the programs on your computer. These are the most important files you have on your computer. They are the email messages you send, the documents you write, the financial records you keep, your digital photographs and music files. So, when your hard drive fails on you, you will lose all of these important data files. This can be a major disaster for you. Let me tell you about a real situation that occurred this past year.
A member of a user groups in California had been taking lots of pictures with her digital camera. She saved these on her hard drive in albums ready to show her family and friends. Her wedding pictures were also saved on her hard drive. One morning, she could not get her hard drive to work. It had failed on her without a backup. She took the hard drive to a company specializing in recovering data from failed hard drives. They analyzed the drive and told her they could probably get most of her photos back and their fee for this service was $1000. She was shocked at this high fee, but all of her photos were very important to her, so she ended up paying this fee. A good backup would have saved her this expense.
Computer hard drives are very reliable today, but they still fail for many reasons. The hardware can wear out and stop working. A more common reason is that the programs on your main hard drive become corrupted and no longer function. It is not a question of if your hard drive will fail; it is more a question of when will it fail on you. You need to be prepared with a backup for when your hard drive does fails on you.
Backing up your computer's hard drive is a fairly simple concept. To backup your main hard drive, you copy all of the files on that drive and store them on another device that you can save away from your computer. Then if anything should happen to your main hard drive, you put a new hard drive in your computer and copy all of these important files to this new drive. You can be up and running again in minutes with a good backup.
Backing up your hard drive is very easy to do with the latest technology. To help you understand more about how to do backups, I have put together a training session titled the Perfect Backup Approach. You can find it on my web site at www.ugr.com/tutorials.html. Take a few minutes to watch this tutorial and you will have a much better understanding of how to do backups using the latest technology today.
To help you get started to backup your hard drive, we are running a Summer Special that includes the best backup software available today, Acronis True Image 9.0 Home edition. You can order this top rated backup software product for just $29 on our web site at www.usergroupstore.com. The Order Code is UGPBA. It normally sells for $50 in computer stores. To make the deal even better, we will include a copy of our Perfect Backup Approach training CD at this special price. Don't wait too long as the summer is coming to an end and this special will not last into the fall.
To make it easy for you to start to do backups, we have prepared a technical paper titled, Using Acronis True Image 9.0 Home edition that you can find on our web site at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html. Read and follow this article as you install and start to do backups and it will guide you through each of the steps in doing backups. It couldn't be easier to get started.
That completes this article on the importance of backing up your hard drive. If you have questions on this article or other questions about True Image or your hard drive, and I will try to assist you.
Gene Barlow
User Group Relations
PO Box 911600
St George, UT 84791-1600
www.ugr.com
This is one of a series of monthly technical articles that I distribute to those that have subscribed to this newsletter. You can subscribe at www.ugr.com/newsletters.html. Watch for them and learn more about your computer and its hard drive. If you do not want to receive these newsletters, simply reply and ask to have your name removed from the list and I will do so immediately. User group newsletter editors may print this article in their monthly newsletter as long as the article is printed in its entirety and not cut or edited. Please send me a copy of the newsletter containing the article so that I can see what groups are running the articles.